111–120 of 222 posts
I don't like these categories but while we are playing this game: Aren't libertarians also globalists?
I think more simplistically: when you take this group of people and average them out what you get are beliefs that benefit the large companies they represent. That's the signal that is correlated with running a big tech company, and the rest is probably mostly noise. That's all really, they aren't for or against free trade in aggregate, they are for their company trading profitably, on average.
Bullshit. You're committing the fallacy that comes from Marxist thought--- that one's position/class/socio-economic-factors are the determining factors in their values and beliefs. People are not so simple, their thoughts can come from elsewhere. You're wildly underestimating the sentience of these people. I think a better model is that: People who understand economics tend to both be entrepreneurs (they understand t…
Actually the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and yes, people in aggregate are pretty simple. If post-millennium Silicon Valley can be reduced to single idea, it is that predicting that simplicity is a business model.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trump lowered the bar so much that most people think they can do a better job than the current president, and are probably right. What they miss is that running as a republican is very different than running as a democrat (as I guess most tech people would want to). Zuckberg would beat Trump in the democratic primaries, no question about that. But he won't be in front of Trump, he would be in front of many experience…
If you feel like you can do a better job of winning an election against a Clinton and the entirety of mainstream media, you should run in 2020. Against Trump, naturally, so we confirm the hypothesis.
There was a comment about the political influence and aspirations of certain big names in tech, but it has suddenly disappeared. It contained some criticism of Paul Graham and Sam Altman, but seemed totally reasonable to me -- can anyone say why it was deleted?
I wrote it, I don't feel like being an ass and I'm feeling overly aggressive today, not to mention I am a guest in someone else's house. ...but my overall point is that the tech elite is composed of a lot of rich white guys with connections, who naturally help each other out. Sam Altman runs YC now and as of last year was apparently seriously considering running for governor of California. That strikes me as grandios…
Author of the study they wrote about here. I think the NYT write up is better: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/silicon-valley... . Study here: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers... .
- The survey covers just SV elites. It would be interesting to see how those beliefs compare to rank-and-file SV tech company employees (and to see that broken down further by profession). Differences in values between employees and bosses could lead to conflict further down the road.
- I'm reading more lately about the degree to which our temperament (the Big 5 personality index) influences our political beliefs. For instance, the managers and executives of established companies tend to be very high in Conscientiousness, which correlates with conservative beliefs. Entrepreneurs on the other hand score very high in Openness, which correlates with Liberal beliefs. I suspect their differences from standard Democrat politics stems from a relatively lower score in Agreeableness.
Edit: formatting and extended a thought.
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That is true -- it's a very effective playbook to starve a program of funding and then argue it should be eliminated because "it doesn't work".
So is the other playbook, where effectively every excuse always boils down to "we need more money" or "we're underfunded".
Oh wait, studies require funding too, so we can't have those.
I mean do you honestly believe that a Republican would propose increasing funding of a non-military, non-security agency if they were shown hard evidence that said agency's problems were in fact caused by lack of money?
Anecdotally, I've worked as a business analyst with many government agencies, and I've found that in most cases they are underfunded, sometimes horrifyingly so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trump lowered the bar so much that most people think they can do a better job than the current president, and are probably right. What they miss is that running as a republican is very different than running as a democrat (as I guess most tech people would want to). Zuckberg would beat Trump in the democratic primaries, no question about that. But he won't be in front of Trump, he would be in front of many experience…
In all fairness, the prior President was a one-term Senator, who pretty much started running for President just 18 months into that one term. The actual merits of Trump or Obama notwithstanding, it's been three election cycles now since without traditional career politician in the White House. I'm not sure I can fault tech billionaires for thinking that this might be a real emerging trend, rather than just a pair of…
That is 100% traditional career politician in almost every way, it's just he was good enough to do it faster than most people.
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I welcome it. I'd much rather have a crowded field than what we had in the last election on the Democratic side - a field emptied by the presence of a dominant presumptive nominee. More competition is a good thing.
More competition is also how we got Trump on the republican side because the number of candidates lowered the bar for receiving a plurality of the votes. Trump never would have beaten someone like Cruz, Rubio, or even Jeb in a primary straight up.
Really agree with this post
https://medium.com/@russroberts/the-world-turned-upside-down...
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The rich white guys you mentioned in this comment are all Jewish, for what it's worth. Not trying to be a conspiracy theorist or a racist here, but trying to pin this on white privilege isn't entirely accurate.
When it suits the privilege narrative, Jewish people are white.
But instead I've been flagged.